Donald's Missives

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Most Christians know instinctively
the importance of the Trinity in defining their faith as Christians, and they
are proud to bear its name. We proclaim the Trinity week after week in the
Nicene Creed, and often begin what we do liturgically in “the name of the
Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” We were baptized in that Name. Belief in the Trinity is the central
theological doctrine that sets Christians apart from other faith communities ––
such as our Jewish and Muslim friends and neighbors –– who also believe in the
same one God.

But down through the ages, the
Trinity has often been the source of confusion and dissension. We might well ask: What is it about the
Trinity that puts it at the very center of our Christian faith but yet remains
so elusive to our everyday understanding? Does the Trinity have any spiritual
meaning for us today or is it simply some outdated theological/intellectual
argument that speaks to no one in the modern era?

We live in a
world in which many question the very existence of God. Some see God only as a “delusion.” I read of one doubter referring to the God of
the Bible as “a petty, unjust ... capricious bully” who should have no place in
the contemporary consciousness. Journalist Sam Harris, citing terrorist acts
committed in the name of God, argues that the time has come for “the end of
faith.” Some may remember a few decades
ago when Time magazine created a sensation with its provocative cover asking,
“Is God dead?” -- from the ideas
promulgated by the German philosopher, Nietzsche. . .(I loved the great t-shirt I saw a few years
later:“God is Dead” ---Nietzsche;“Nietzsche is Dead” ---God.)

What is a
believer to make of all of this? Is it finally time to write God’s obituary and
mourn his passing? Or are reports of God’s demise, like those of Mark Twain
over a century ago, “greatly exaggerated?” God is too often blamed for what his followers
say about him and surely we can all hang our heads in shame over what has been
done and is being done in God’s name. Actually, what must die are the false notions
of who and what God is – a God, too often, made in our image. As Anglican bishop
and scholar J. B. Phillips wrote in 1952, “Your God Is Too Small!” Our notions
of God are always too small, but does that mean that God is dead?

It is often said that preachers
should be very careful preaching on Trinity Sunday, because it is almost
impossible to do so without committing some kind of heresy.Why?Because we really cannot understand God, as hard as we try to explain God
(or the Trinity) to others.Only God
really knows and understands God.

For me, Trinity Sunday is not the
celebration of a doctrine.It is not a
time when we should be so bold to think we can explain the mystery of God.Trinity Sunday is best kept simply as a joyful
celebration of our life with God.It is
a time to recognize and give thanks for the relationship we have with God and
the relationships God has with us in many forms of expression and experience.The Trinity is an expression of community
itself—the dance of God with each of us and with the community of faith.This faith is grounded in our experience of
God in our daily lives, in our worship, in our prayer, in our attentiveness to
Holy Scripture, and in the apostolic fellowship of our life together.

[In a children’s homily I did a few
years ago, I used this analogy: My wife
calls me Donald.My daughters call me
Dad.My grandsons call me Papa.Am I three different people?Even though I may have at least three
different names, no, I am the same person, simply three different
relationships. . . .It is all about
relationships.]

Let’s look at our experience of God
as a church/congregation.As a people of
faith, this is a time to reaffirm our belief in God, to name our experience of
the Holy One in our lives and the life of the community, allowing God to shape
who we are as congregation and what we are to do.Only by having the courage to turn to God and
by laying claim to the faith we profess can we truly become who God would have
us be.If we are not being formed by our
prayer, our worship, and our faith then all that we do as a church will be
focused solely on the need to survive as some sort of benevolent social club in
competition with the secular organizations of the world.

It has often been the tendency of
the church, and especially in these more recent times, to structure ourselves
on the model of the world around us.The
bishops and clergy become like C.E.O.s of a collection of institutions that we
are sometimes hard pressed to tell apart from every other institution around
us.Our people work hard to see that we
survive, and at times even thrive, in this secular world, bringing to our life
together their own experience of the world.But at the heart of our corporate life we must remember that we are the
people of God and this is God’s church.One of the great temptations in the life of institutional religion today
is to simply to buy into the corporate/business model of functioning in a
secular world, rather than seeking to be a genuine faith community set in the
midst of the secular world with a mission to sanctify the unholy and to
reconcile the alienated.

We are standing on holy ground.We are in a sacred place.It is
in the church that the sacred touches the secular, a worship setting where God is
made known to those of us in the world, and it is to this community we are
commissioned to bring others to an encounter with the Holy. This is a holy and
sacred place for each of us because here we have found God, we have been touched
by Christ, and our lives have been transformed.

We say we are a people who believe
that God is our Father who created us; that Christ is our brother who came to
be with us – Emmanuel, God with us; and that the Spirit of God continues to
nurture, feed, sustain, and love us every day of our lives.We have committed ourselves to live in this
apostolic community of teaching and fellowship, centering our common life
around the Holy Eucharist and our life of prayer; we acknowledge our failures
and we seek to return daily to God. Through our baptism into this family of
God, we say that we will proclaim the Gospel to everyone; that we will
recognize and serve Christ in others and love all of those around us; and we
will work for justice, peace, and the dignity and value of each
individual.That is the foundation of
this family of God; that is the sum total of what we are all about. This is our
identity and the foundation of our relationship with God and with those around
us.

The idea of the “Trinity” is not
trying to figure out who God is, but, rather, this is simply our feeble attempt
to speak something of our relationship with the Holy in our lives and in the
experience of those who have turned to God.We cannot “define” who this God is – we can only proclaim that God is
Love, the Author of all creation and who created each of us; that God has sent
his beloved Son to show us that we are in a unique relationship of love with
God; and that God fills us with the Spirit to nurture that love in us, giving
us the breath of life to share that grace with one another.This is not everything we can say about God,
but, perhaps, this is all that we really need to know about God.

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

There is a well-known song which is
used often in the renewal circles of the church, which says, “They will know we
are Christians by our love.”There is
such great truth to that simple song.It
is the essence of Christian life – it is the essence of all godly life.Every major religion declares that love is
the foundation on which all people are called to build a life with God and with
each other.In Judaism, Christianity,
Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, among the classic religions,as well as, among numerous Native American
and other ethnic and cultural belief systems, all declare love to be at the
very nature of their faith – love of God, love of other people, love for the
creation and all creatures.We are
talking here of the universal, across the board, most basic drive and instinct
of human nature, however tainted and corrupted it may be by what we call
original sin.Love is the essence of
life and without it being clearly the priority of all living our existence will
be marred by war, greed, hatred, resentments, prejudices, anger, hurt and
unhappiness.

Christianity declares that love is
the basic Christian ethic by which all moral decision making should be made –
“what is the most loving thing to do in this situation . . .”The Shema is the most essential
commandment of the Judeo-Christian community, “Hear, O Israel, you shall love
the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all
your mind.And you shall love your
neighbor as yourself.”The Second
Reading today from 1 John is the classic essay on “love” in the New Testament (This
is a passage which we should read at least once a week, along with 1
Corinthians 13). If we were able to
live out that command to love one another, because love is from God,” we would
be well on our way to respond God’s greatest desire for us.Not only is this the foundation on which we
build our individual lives, we are also building a community – the community of
the church – whose corner stone is that “God so loved the world that he sent
his only Son. . .”To make it even more
urgent and relevant – this is the purpose and meaning of the life and work of
the Church.It is really that simple –
as I have probably said too often – it is very simple, not always very easy,
but very simple.To this end, as far as
I am concerned, the building of a community of love is the mission of this
congregation and the entire church.To
proclaim the good news of God in Christ, to live in fellowship with one
another, praying together, discovering Christ in the breaking of the bread,
serving Christ in all persons, loving God and your neighbor as yourself, and
respecting the dignity of all persons is the purpose of our existence.Anything, anything at all, that distracts us
or deflects this intent is a deterrent to the mission of this community.

But, oh my, how the world and our
society misuse and corrupt the use of the word “love.”It is extremely frustrating to live in a
culture in which words that possess such deep and essential qualities for our
life when used rightly are being bandied about daily on the lowest possible
level.Are you as appalled as I with
this latest genre of TV “reality” shows?There are those geared to see how completely they can gross you out and
show you how can you humiliate your neighbor.There were those shows in which the bachelor was trying to determine
which girl is the “hottest” prospect for a relationship or the girls who were
vying for the presumed wealth of some hunk who in reality doesn’t have money,
brains, or much of anything else to offer.Then, there are ongoing daily fare of “soaps” with their sordid affairs
and vindictive actions designed to really destroy their supposed enemies and
cheapen any and all personal relationships.Fairy tale weddings, romantic novels, and a long history of escapist
fantasies bombard us regularly.Even
those classic children’s stories like the Mother Goose Tales feature
fluffy love along with cruelty, deceit, greed, murder and evil step-mothers.All of which make for spicy drama, but what
of love?

We then arrive in church on a Sunday
morning to hear a preacher talk about “love” and our minds zoom off to the
fantasy land of pop culture or we just “zone out” and “glaze over” as the
sermon goes on with the expected and predictable pleas for a better
understanding of this most basic of all divine directives, “Beloved, let us
love one another. . . .”

While this is the basic building
block of our relationship with God and one another and lies at the heart of the
human community, it is really not all that easy.In fact, this business of love is quite
confusing and difficult for us to even begin getting it right.The Greek philosophers even had different
words for different aspects of love: for friendship, for affection like that of
a parent for a child, for erotic or sexual love which is a basic and vital part
of human nature, and, of course, divine love – agape.And I am reluctant, even if I could, to try
to draw a line between where one ends and the other begins.In fact, it is God’s love which is the common
thread which runs through the entire tapestry of life and which holds it all
together.

“In
every moment of genuine love, we are dwelling in God and God in us.”
(Tillich)That is the point which I
believe God wants us to hear.This is
the point I want to make and I think this is the point God would have us hear
this morning – “In every moment of genuine love, we are acknowledging that
we are dwelling in God and God in us.”

In every moment of genuine love, we
are living in God and God in us.Stop
for a moment, pause, and ask, “Have I never felt the strength of God welling up
in me, giving me a new insight, a surge of energy, or a flash grace for the
moment at hand, grace that can only come from a power beyond my mortal wisdom or
ability?”Think of those times in your
life as you turned inward and you know that you have found deep within your
soul that gift of God – undeserved and unearned, more than likely, but there it
is – the presence of the Holy Spirit, the power of God.That is the gift of love God shares in each
of us. That is true prayer – a profound communication – a deep connection with
the Holy.

Now, what does this imply for us as
we go about living today?From that holy
power comes the force in our lives that enables and ignites real friendship
for another and the willingness to accept friendship offered to you.It is the care for the well-being of others,
unqualified respect for the people around us, the ability to give to those in
need, a readiness to accept the care and concern of others, and the desire to
live in a community of faith and mutual fellowship.

The love of God, in which we live,
is, also, the source of the affection that we have for our families, our
parents, and our children.This is the
gentle love and warmth that St. Paul said was patient and kind, not envious or
arrogant or rude and a love which bears all things, hopes all things, endures
all things.It is that love the parent
has for his/her child that remains no matter what they may do.(This may be the closest approximation we
make to God’s love for us.).

There is physical love, the driving
force of our own sexuality and, with it, the respect and care of that
force in the lives of others.This love
is the one that can most easily be cheapened and most often abused, but it
cannot and dare not be denied.It is a
love which is very sacramental as we commonly define sacrament – that outward
and visible sign (physical) of an inward and spiritual grace.Physical love is a grace that expresses
itself in a deep and faithful relationship with another which is intensely
personal, precious, and reflective of a love which would not be fully expressed
without it.

Lastly, but most importantly,
soaring far above all forms of human love, there is God’s love– the unmerited, unlimited, unqualified love
God has for us.All love has its origins
in God and we do not live outside of his love.As John said, “God first loves us.”

As promised, you have heard nothing
new here this morning.This is the old,
old story.It is in the energy and power
of God’s absolute and perfect love for us that we live.And that is why we gather here this morning
and every time we gather as a worshiping community – to sing God’s praises, to
be filled by his Holy Spirit, and to joyfully celebrate with one another that
we are living in God and God in us.We
are celebrating all about who God is – LOVE -- and who we are – LOVE.

Saturday, April 7, 2012

“Do not
be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified.He has been raised; he is not here.Look, there is the place where they laid
him.But go, tell his disciples and
Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as
he told you.” [Mark 16:6-7]

Mark’s original version of the Easter story is very short
and ends abruptly with the women who went to the tomb being told that the Risen
Lord had gone to Galilee and would meet them there.Mark kept it very simple.“Galilee” was back out into the world, into
Jesus’ own territory, where he lives with everyone else.That is where we, too, find Jesus and that is
where he meets us.That is the place of
the church.It is not a place of
commemoration of a dead Jesus, not even simply a place to adore a Messiah that
we are taught was raised.Instead, the
church is the threshold into Galilee, a window into the world where the risen
Christ goes ahead of us.It is the
meeting point of heaven and earth, where the sacred and the secular meet in the
presence of the living Lord.

We
are fed and nurtured, we are assured of the most basic and essential belief of
Christendom that our God lives in the person of Christ, not confined to a box
on the altar nor the boundaries of these walls.Christ lives in the world where you and I live.We have come here to discover him for
ourselves in order to recognize him in our world, where we can point to him and
say, “There he is, my Lord and my God.”Easter is the very essence of life, not simply a recurring feast day in
the Christian Calendar.It is the
shattering of what we think we know in order to make way for the real truth –
that God is alive in our world and in the life of each and everyone of us.

This is a challenge
to all of us, as our Presiding Bishop once said, “The reality that Easter
proclaims is that everything that restricts, diminishes, imprisons and limits
life as God intends it . . .is trampled
down by the risen Christ.Christ’s
victory is therefore a challenge to everything within us and within the church
and our world that resists Christ’s all-embracing freedom.” Presiding Bishop
Katherine said, “In this Easter season I would encourage you to look at where
you are finding new life and resurrection, where life abundant and love
incarnate are springing up in your lives and the lives of your communities.
There is indeed greenness, whatever the season.Give thanks for Easter. Give thanks for resurrection. Give thanks for
the presence of God incarnate in our midst.”

Unhampered, for the most part, with confusion with secular
celebrations, like Christmas, Easter is the ultimate celebration of the
Christian experience.It is on this day
that we hear once again the story of our faith: the experience of the women who
went to the tomb; the vision of the Apostles to whom he later appeared; the
proclamation of the church through the ages that the tomb was empty and that
Jesus has risen from the dead; and that we have been liberated and given new
life and hope.

Ironically, this is the most difficult day of the year for
the preacher to preach, because one cannot really embellish on the story or say
more than our worship says for us.Easter, actually all of Holy Week, also, is the church at its best,
doing what it is intended to do, being what we are called to be—a community of
faith which gathers to share our faith and celebrate the love of God for us and
one another.It is our experience
of God within our life in the church and with one another that defines who we
are.We are not here to explain or
justify what we believe, but simply to celebrate it.We are here to have a wonderful day of
praise, worship, and sharing fellowship with one another, and, together, coming
to the altar of our God to receive the Body and Blood of Christ.Our life as Christians does not begin with
understanding.We cannot and dare not
attempt to approach Easter with the idea to de-mystify it, rationalize it, or
explain it in anyway that “makes sense.”

Dean
Alan Jones wrote, “The Resurrection is not about a dead carpenter being
resuscitated and making it onto the six o'clock news.It is the explosion of the radically New.The Good News is about the New breaking in on
our tired, frustrated, and divided world and filling us with awe, wonder, and
longing. . It is an invitation to live and to live now. (Alan Jones, Passion for Pilgrimage)

The “New” of this Resurrection faith is the experience of
the physical, material reality of the people of God who discover that we are
living now in the reality of the Presence of the Holy.Our faith may be informed by the
experience of others, but our faith is formed by our encounter with the
risen Lord.

Now, look and see for yourself where Christ is in your
life.Our acceptance of his presence
changes our lives—how we see life, how we live life, how we relate to each
other, how we set our priorities, how we go about the business of daily living,
and ultimately, how we define ourselves.Such an experience is what transforms and enlivens us within this
community of faith.It is almost more
than we can bear because it is so wonderful, so powerful, so real.God lives!We are stretched to the breaking point in these turbulent times and in
our own turbulent existence and, yet, we are brought face to face with the immeasurable
riches of God.

Friday, March 16, 2012

Today’s Gospel is so familiar to us and we, more often than not, take
it with a smile or a smirk, thinking, “That’s right, Jesus, you show
them.”Jesus driving the money changers
out of the Temple seemed good and right, but to the first Century Jew
(especially the Scribes and Pharisees) this was the height of blasphemy and an
attack on the very life of the Temple and its sacrificial system, not to
mention a key component to the support system of the Temple and it
priests.To put this in a framework we
can identify with, suppose some righteous soul, taking the Gospel at its word,
came through the Farmers Market turning over the tables of the sellers or driving
away the crowd with a whip as they sat down for a great meal at the Annual
Auction.Hmm. That would not go over
very well, methinks.We would call the
police and have them arrested.

But, as the Gospel says, will zeal for God’s house consume us?What might be going on in the mind of God,
presuming that God is sitting in on a Vestry meeting as we discuss the budget
for the next year, or if Christ was eavesdropping on a Diocesan Council meeting
as it was planning for the expenditures of the Diocese for the new year?

Now, don’t get me wrong.I was a
parish priest for forty years.I know
the challenges of maintaining the structure and operating realistically in
today’s world.I know the struggle of
keeping your head above water and not being overwhelmed by the cost of keeping
the ship afloat.In my entire ministry,
I never had a parish that there was not a huge task to meet budgets, pay decent
salaries, pay the light bill and all of the other “household” expenses of the
church. We had to hold all sorts of fund raising projects, hopefully keeping in
focus what this is all about.Nevertheless, I know all too well how easily we become so distracted by
the struggle that we can, and often do, lose sight of what is our primary
vocation.I have said to every
congregation I have ever served that I thought that I had heard Jesus
muttering, as he looked at the contemporary church, “No, no, that is not what I
meant!”

On the other hand, I am convinced that there is truth in the fact that
this is not first century Palestine, but 21st Century America with a
totally different set of needs and issues.The community of faith, that we call the church, is going to look
differently today than two thousand years ago, one thousand years ago, one
hundred years ago, and, maybe, even what that community looked like when I was
ordained over forty-eight years ago.But,
have we worked ourselves into some sort of trap whereby we have to struggle to
preserve what was, in our imagination, the “good old days” that may not have
been all that good; or have the “shakers and movers” of the church and society
really found anything that is that much better; or have we simply gone
off-course and lost sight of the priorities that God has set before us?

The bottom line question for me this morning is: “Does this Gospel have
any significance or relevance to us and to the church of the 21st
Century?”I believe it has a profound
lesson for us and a highly significant and relevant point to be made to our
church and all Christian churches today.By taking the point of the lesson to heart, we are being asked to raise
the question, “Who are we as a church, as a people of faith living in community
with one another; who and what is our mission?”

Jesus tells us, when he speaks of the “Temple” being his body.The church has always said, even if it did
not understand, that the church is the Body of Christ. The presence of Christ
in the world is made known, seen, and heard through the community of faith,
this company of believers who re-present Christ to the world.Jesus, the revolutionary, the compassionate
zealot, who created the disturbance in the Temple precincts that day, is the
incarnation of the mercy and the holiness of God.If then, we are the Body of Christ in the
world today, then the mercy and holiness of God lives in the hearts of all
those who are of the household of God.God dwells in us – you and me – and God desires for us to live fully in
the compassion and grace of Christ and be an invitation to all others to come
and be an integral part of the Body.And
to enter into the Holy of Holies at the center of our life together we must
always seek to remove the obstacles that obscure our vision and block our
access to God, just as Jesus drove out the sacrificial animals and the money
changers from the Temple that week of Passover.

What we, the institutional church, has done is rather than allowing
Christ at the heart of the church, we have allowed the church, its survival,
and its comfortable place in our society of today to replace the heart of God.I have often reminded my congregations that
the church is not God – please do not confuse the two.The church of our creation has too often
become our own secret society or club which often bears little resemblance to
the heart Christ.With every good
intention and every desire for the good, we may have lost the vision of Christ
and replaced that vision with our own methods of survival in a secular world.

Is the church, for us, the body that points us to God or has it become
an end in itself?Is the church a place
where the faithful gather to celebrate our life together in God or has it
become a place of distraction and self-absorption – is it about God or is it
about me?

The call is clearly to remove the obstacles that stand between us and
God – to seek to discover God at the center of our life together, just as God
is at the center of the Incarnate Lord.We are called primarily to be a community of prayer.More than simply coming together to say our
prayers, we are a community of prayer which means we live in an awareness of
the presence of God in our lives, in the lives of everyone we meet, and at the
center of the life of all creation, and we celebrate that life of union with
the Holy One.

Then, celebrating God at our center, we begin to ignite our desire to
be like Christ, whose Body we claim to be, and live our life together with new
and vigorous zeal of commitment to the mission of Christ.We are called to be a prophetic community of faith, daring to be an invitation to others
to be a part of this family of God and to share in the mission of Christ.This may well mean that we must take risks,
to make what amounts to a counter-cultural commitment to the mission of Christ
to reach out to everyone: to care for the sick, the poor, the outcasts, the
lonely, the elderly, the young, the fearful, the confused and the distracted.We are called to be Jesus’ voice in this
world which is running amuck – just look at our present political rhetoric, the
rampant anger and hostility between people in the nation, in the world, and
even in the church – a world that is starving for the sound of reason, decency,
and mutual respect. If we are truly the church God wants us to be, we will be a
reconciling, loving, inclusive, and renewed community of forgiven, thankful,
grateful – eucharistic – people.If we
are genuinely placing God at the center of our awareness as a community of the
faithful, we will begin to discover the reality of the presence of the Holy One
in everyone we meet.

As the Body of Christ, we are called to live this life together with
others, supporting and serving one another, offering our praise and worship, welcoming
everyone into this fellowship of hope and love.The more we seek to know God, the more we want to take up the cross and
follow Christ, the more we work to serve each other, the more we will truly be
the Church. It is here, in this sacred Body, that we promised in our baptism to
serve Christ in all persons, to strive for justice and peace among all people,
and to respect the dignity of every human being.

In order to follow him, we need to remove the barriers and
distractions, the self-importance and the greed, outgrowing the survival
mentality that condemns the church to mediocrity and eventual death, and boldly
and with courage transform our life together so that we may, indeed, become who
God would have us be.

Thursday, March 1, 2012

Being a disciple of Jesus was not for sissies, Peter found out in the
Gospel account today.Jesus was telling
him that he (Jesus) must greatly suffer, be rejected by all of the officials
and important people of their society, and that he would be killed.While he said he would rise again after three
days, what Peter mainly heard was the suffering and death of this man whom he
loved and for whom he had given up everything to follow.In Peter’s usual blustery way, he declared
that he would never let that happen and he rebuked Jesus for even thinking it,
much less saying it.

Then Jesus said a remarkable thing to Peter, “Get behind me,
Satan.For you are setting your mind not
on divine things, but on human things.”Then Jesus said to everyone a remarkable and scary thing, “If any want
to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and
follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, the those who
lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”

Whoa!That is not what most had
bargained for and, I suspect, a number who were following Jesus left about that
time.It seemed there would be a high
price, a great cost, to being a disciple of Jesus.This is a feature of being a Christian that
today we pretty much ignore and try to look the other way.We are sure that being a Christian is about
being good, moral, kindly to others, patient, generous, and showing up at
church every Sunday.Those are most
certainly good things and important to our lives as Christians.Jesus would not disparage such behavior, but
Jesus is calling for something more, something more weighty and challenging,
and, often, far more difficult.You can
even be a very nice and caring person without believing in Jesus or even God,
but we really cannot faithfully be a follower of Christ without being a person
of conversion: your heart must be where God’s heart is, as well as your hands
and your feet.This takes great
courage.It is far easier said than
done.I have not gotten it right, yet,
but we begin with our desire.Our desire
to follow Christ, to take up the cross lies at the heart of discipleship.To do it it right, to take seriously the
words of Jesus in the Gospel today, there is a price to pay.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the martyred German theologian and pastor, who was
executed by the Nazis in 1945, wrote in his great book,The
Cost of Discipleship, about the contrast between “cheap grace” and “costly
grace:”

Cheap grace is the deadly enemy
of our Church.We are fighting today for
costly grace.

Cheap grace means a grace as a
doctrine, a principle, a system . . . Cheap grace is the preaching of
forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without Church discipline,
Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession.Cheap grace is grace without discipleship,
grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate . . .

Costly grace is the gospel which
must be sought again and again . . .Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace
because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ.It is costly because it costs us our life, and it is grace because it
gives us the only true life . . .

Grace
is costly because it compels us to submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him;
it is grace because Jesus says, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

I have a confession to
make:I was not sure that I believed
that Jesus’ yoke was easy or his burden light.I did not understand that assurance from Jesus until one memorable day
many years ago in Costa Rica.When I was
first ordained I went to Costa Rica as a missionary and I was there for six
wonderful years.I was at one of our
missions for a couple of days and was staying in a small little room at the
back of the church.One morning, I
opened the shutter to see a teenage boy across the way hitching up a team of
oxen to pull some huge mahogany logs from out of the edge of the jungle.He placed a large heavy yoke across their
necks and tied it to the oxen.He then
connected a large chain from the yoke to the logs and started beating on the
oxen to pull the heavy load.The oxen
strained and pulled against each other and made all sorts of unhappy noises as
the boy continued beating on them.About
the time, the boy’s father came running out of their small house and he pushed
the boy aside and he tied the heavy yoke to the oxen by lashing it to them so
tightly that I thought he would pop their horns off.Then an amazing thing happened.The oxen settled right down.With a very light tap on their rumps the oxen
pulled the huge log out of the field towards the lumber mill like it was a
match stick.

Watching this scenario, it all
dawned on me about what Jesus meant when he said, “My yoke is easy.”By attaching the yoke so tightly, instead of
it being a burden it became a source of strength and power.That is what Jesus meant when he said, “Take
up my cross.”When we attach ourselves
so closely and tightly to the cross of Christ, then in place of it being a
fearful burden, the cross becomes a source of great strength and power.

This is the great invitation to
follow Christ.To so bind ourselves to him
then, even in our own weakness and flawed humanity, we are infused with the
power and grace of Christ and we make our journey towards God, serving God and
God’s people and creation with Jesus’ obedience and courage.

Being a Christian means that our
desire is to be like Christ (even though we are far from fulfilling that
desire) and to seek to live a life with new and , at times, countercultural
commitment to his mission to bring others into this family of God: to care for
the sick, the outcasts, the poor, the elderly, the lonely, and the fearful in
such a way that they know the grace and love of God.This can be a lonely and confusing task, but
being a follower of Jesus means that we embrace this loneliness.As God came to be fully human in Jesus, so we
too, understand what is means to be fully human through Jesus.This is where we find glimpses of grace.

How do we even begin such a
journey?We begin with a life of prayer
– not just the saying of our prayers, even though that is how we start – but
living in an awareness of the presence of God in our lives and in the lives of
every person.We seek to see and know
the power of God in all places.We live
this life together with others of faith as we support one another, together we
offer worship and praise to God, and we live as grateful, thankful, eucharistic
people.With that foundation, we reach
out to everyone in the world around us, caring for and loving one another,
seeking peace, working for justice and the well-being of others.

We began Lent with a reminder
that we are but dust and to dust we shall return.But even in the reality of our limitations
and our mortality, we have been empowered by the cross of Christ to be like
him.Yes, to be like him!Leave behind our fears and our notions of inadequacy
and take up the cross and follow him in order to become who God would have us
be.The more we know God, the closer we
come to Christ, the more we become ourselves.There is true freedom in what Jesus asks of us – the freedom to draw
near to God, to love and accept one another and ourselves, as well, without
constraint.

Let us always ask, and listen,
“where is Jesus asking me to follow him in my life today?”Perhaps it is time to take that step of
faithfulness, of vulnerability, of be being loved by God, of living and sharing
the Good News, to reach out in love and compassion to everyone, and to know
that in this body we call, “the Church,” there are no outcasts.Here we are trying to serve Christ in all
persons, striving for justice and peace among all people, and respecting the
dignity of every human being.

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

The following prayer was given to me by Father Nick Minich﻿ on the occasion of my ordination to the priesthood on February 16, 1964. It has been a daily prayer for these past forty-eight years. I give thanks for the gift, the joy, and the privilege of that call.

LORD JESUS,

You have called me to your priesthood
to carry on the work which you began.

Fit me, I pray you, for this task with such faith that
through my voice even the disbelieving may listen to you word;

With such hope that through my hands even the despairing may
be held fast in your grip;

And with such charity that through my heart even the despised
may know that you can never cease to love them.

Join me so deeply to yourself that no one I meet shall lie
beyond your saving grace.

Thursday, February 9, 2012

THE SIXTH SUNDAY AFTER THE EPIPHANY

FEBRUARY 12, 2012

(Year B)

A Homily

The Very Reverend Donald W. Krickbaum

2 KINGS 5: 1-15b — 1 CORINTHIANS 9:24-27 — MARK
1:40-45

This is the season of
Epiphany, the time when the light of Christ is made known to the world.Now is the time for us to shine the light of
Christ into this darkened world in which we are living.Today and throughout this liturgical season
of Epiphany, we are hearing stories of healing – one of the means through which
Jesus expressed the authority and the love of God in a given moment.We hear later in Mark’s Gospel, how Jesus
spoke of his coming passion and death, inviting those who loved him to take up the
cross and follow him.We watch as he
broke bread with his disciples for the last time and was immediately arrested
and executed.And then, we stand before
the empty tomb early on Easter morning to be told that he is alive, he is
risen.It is a powerful and soul-shaking
story.Sit down and read Mark’s Gospel
right through.It is not very long, and
you will be overwhelmed by the story as it unfolds before you all at one time.

If you do that, you will be
caught up in the truth that the kingdom of God is right here, right now.A sense of immediacy and urgency will
overtake you and you will see the true mission of Jesus to show us who this God
is and what God is like, and how we are to live if we choose to be a part of
the story.We are living in a world
where we need to recapture the sense of urgency that existed in the early
church and today make an immediate and urgent call for light, a call for
reconciliation, healing, and peace -- a call for God.

Jesus began this work of
reconciliation by touching and healing those who turned to him.This is what the kingdom of God is all about:
touching, healing, loving, caring for each person.Jesus used his miracles to get the people’s
attention so they could hear his teaching; hear that he was calling them to
come and find new life; and for us to hear that we who have been called are now
sent to call others to come and see what we have discovered – that we are loved
and offered peace and new life.

Is the Gospel relevant to
today’s world?You bet it is.Is it relevant to each of us?Is the Gospel of Christ relevant to you in
your life today?Yes, indeed.What I think we sometimes miss in the whole
wonder of the Gospel is the fact that Jesus was sent to each one of us and that
his whole life, while caught up in the mission of the reconciliation of the
world, never lost its focus on the person.Jesus stopped and touched the leper.In his grand scheme, his love and his desire to touch the lives of
people would cause him to pause to heal, to reach out to those who hungered for
what he came to give them.Do you
understand that this means that he came for you — you, yourself, just as you
are at this very moment?Today’s reading
clearly reminds us of the directness and the immediacy of God’s love, desire,
and care for each of us.He stops and
turns toward us and says, “Peace, be whole.”

You see, we are invited into
a relationship with a God of Peace, who cares about the peace of the world and
peace among nations, and who also cares deeply about your peace.As we are called to pray for peace, we are
called to pray with and for one another.Jesus was always “person-centered.”God is “person-centered.”“He so
loved the world,” but because it is your world.God desires peace for his creation, because
it is your home.God desires peace for
each of us and a sense of joy and health for every individual.And, by his example, Jesus is teaching us
about how we should be as his church, his family and community – to care for each
person and to love every person.Yes, we
are concerned with great and weighty issues – issues of war and peace – but we
must, also, turn to those around us, caring for the person next to us, and
showing that God loves and redeems every individual who will accept his
love – note, I said, accept, not earn.

We can get so preoccupied
with our plans and the building of institutions that we lose sight of the
primary mission of Christ.Like Jesus,
we are called to draw others to God and, like Jesus, we are to show others who
God is and what God is like.Like Jesus,
we keep our eyes on God and his love for the world, but, at the same time, we
must never lose sight of the leper who was touched and healed, for we, in fact,
are the leper.We are the individuals
who are touched by the compassion of Christ and the love of God.We have been healed because he has chosen to
do so.Now we are the prophets, the
wounded healers, the restored and reconciled sinners.We are the Beloved’s beloved.